Every January our electronic overlords at WordPress provide a yearly summary of activity at this blog. There’s not much that’s surprising on the 2012 report. We had about 83,000 visits, which is a lot more than in 2011 and a few more than in 2010. The bump is an anomaly, however. Last year over New Year’s, a powerful Facebook meme had people around the world googling to find the #1 song on their birth dates, and on January 5 alone, this blog recorded 3,292 visits. That’s nearly four times bigger than the previous record day and more than 10 times a normal day. So the first week of 2012 is likely responsible for the supposed increase in eyeballs for 2012 over 2011.

Except for my links list and my radio schedule, all of my most-viewed posts were One Day in Your Life posts, and most were from 2008 or earlier. I don’t know what that means. The most-viewed post written in 2012 was “Memorials,” inspired by the death of our Internet friend Chris Stufflestreet last September. (I can’t decide whether it’s sad or awesome that one of Chris’s blogs, 70s Music Mayhem, has continued to robo-post since his death with posts written before, most recently the day after Christmas. I am leaning toward awesome.)

WordPress gives me the opportunity to see the search terms that bring people to the site. Although my first blog, the Daily Aneurysm, once came up in a search somebody did for “pictures of gay guys wrestling in Speedos,” no similarly perplexing phrases turn up in the 2012 terms for this blog. Two of the top searches were “jabartlett” and “hits just keep on coming,” so at least y’all remember my name. “Pilot of the Airwaves” and “Eighteen With a Bullet” ranked high, too—clearly radio stations are missing a bet if they aren’t programming these two records, since people obviously like them. As indicated above, many of the popular search terms were dates. For some reason, October 1, 1982, was the biggest.

The most commented-upon posts of 2012 were “It’s a Bleep Girl,” about bowdlerized radio hits, “All Day Long,” about long songs, and “Listen, Children, to a Story That Was Written Long Ago,” about the song “One Tin Soldier.” Many thanks to the top commenters of 2012: Porky, Yah Shure, spinetingler (who read the entire blog over the course of the year without harm to himself, as far as I know), kblumenau (who bought me a beer via Twitter this year), and Jeffrey Thames (King of Grief). You (and everyone else who’s even been moved to comment) raise the level of discourse considerably.

Once again, there were fewer posts last year than in the year before—168, down from 182 in 2011 and 214 in 2010. I suspect that trend may continue in 2013.  (But I also thought the 2012 number would be a lot less than in 2011, so what do I know.) In addition to whatever I can scrape up at this site, I plan to continue contributing to Popdose, where World’s Worst Songs and The #1 Albums will appear there (on Tuesday and Thursday evenings respectively) until they don’t anymore.

Rather like each one of us, every morning of our lives.